The multi-cloud application delivery solutions vendor has been focused mainly on public cloud infrastructure providers, but they are broadening out into the enterprise, and see Nutanix, with its strong presence in private and hybrid clouds, as a key route to market there.
Shashi Kiran, Appcito’s CMO
Santa Clara-based Appcito, which makes multi-cloud application delivery solutions, and which has been focused on customers focused on the public cloud, has announced a new partnering with Nutanix designed to drive deeper into the enterprise space. Appcito has had their Appcito Application Delivery System (ADS) offering validated as Nutanix-ready. They have also joined the Nutanix Elevate Technology Alliance Partner Program.
“We are a two-year old venture-backed startup, which started with a mission to accelerate cloud adoption,” said Shashi Kiran, Appcito’s CMO. “Today, we see a lot of companies going to public clouds and a lot of enterprises spinning up their own cloud. It’s all driven by where applications reside, and how to get them to perform best whatever cloud they are on.”
The Appcito ADS is designed to provide application-centric infrastructure management for public, private and hybrid clouds, and is delivered through a SaaS (software-as-a-service) model. They compete against traditional application delivery vendors, who are not cloud-native, and against open source tools, which are cloud-native, but lack things like security, high availability deeper analytics or higher visibility that larger customers expect.
“We see a five billion dollar opportunity where customers want shrink-wrapped solutions with self-service capability, where we married agility to compliance in a unique architecture that can provide this, and offer it as a no CAPEX, ‘pay for what you use’ offering,” Kiran said. “Our architecture is very differentiated, and it actually collapses the different tiers, so that a proxy can be on cloud, on premise, or both can be hosted. It gives a tremendous amount of flexibility.”
Appcito’s initial base of customers were cloud-focused ones who wanted lower costs and complexity, including large infrastructure vendors.
“With our early customers, we learned how to best scale sessions,” Kiran said. “Some customers have almost a billion sessions a month, and are in a position to do seamless upgrades with no disruptions.” Most of these were initially in AWS, but that has been supplemented by a second group of customers using different public clouds like Microsoft Azure and Google. Now Appcito is seeing a third group of customers, larger enterprises who have built data centres, but who now also want to leverage the power of public cloud and IaaS, and are doing this in stages.
Vendor partnerships, like the new one with Nutanix, are a critical part of Appcito’s go-to-market strategy.
“As a startup, we have been very judicious about who we partner with,” Kiran said. “Our initial go-to market has largely been with cloud partners, leveraging their ability to help bring our solutions to the end customer. It’s a service they can deliver, and the provider can be an MSP associated with a public cloud, or it can be the enterprise infrastructure team offering it to the application team. This dissolves those siloes between the teams.”
Cloud provider partners include AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and CenturyLink, with Kiran saying more would be announced. Their solution is also available for OpenStack clouds. A series of Tier One cloud services partners will also be announced, Kiran said.
Nutanix joins a number of core technology partners, which include VMware, Pluribus, Puppet and Chef. The Nutanix-validated offering leverages Nutanix Prism and Appcito sizing tools, reference designs and simple installation to go production as much as 30X faster than traditional application delivery.
“We see working with Nutanix as increasingly significant moving forward,” Kiran said. “Because we offer a managed SaaS offering, we went to the public cloud first, and the majority of our resources were initially predicated on the public cloud environment. The last year and a half, we have been mainly focused on this space. In the last few months, however, we find that we are increasingly being pulled into the enterprise. Nutanix plays in the private cloud space as well as in hybrid, and this ability to offer these hybrid cloud solutions is appealing to us. That’s why we are aligning ourselves with them.”
Kiran also expects the Nutanix partnership will expand Appcito’s presence in the solution provider channel.
“It’s meant for partners focused on cloud and cloud adoption, and we highly encourage them to look at us,” he said. “It’s easy to get going. Typically, they can get it up in less than five minutes. It’s a low risk, software play.”
